Marcus Venegas
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Aug 12
- 3 min read
Marcus Venegas is a Mexican-American artist working with drawing, painting, and mixed media. His practice is grounded in personal memory, using autobiographical fragments, lyrics, and symbolic materials to reflect on intimacy, identity, and the passing of time. Starting with poetry and music, he builds emotionally charged scenes that often blur the line between personal documentation and visual fiction. Figures in his work are drawn from close relationships or from memory, set within theatrical compositions that echo romance, vulnerability, and humor. Now based in New York, Venegas continues to explore storytelling through a visual language shaped by lived experience and emotional immediacy.
Q: How did your early experiences with comic books and pop culture shape the way you started to draw?
A: Pop culture has played a huge role in the way I was raised. Music specifically enables me to create something much more sincere. I delve into a universe where only my music, my drawing, and myself exist, resulting in a more “complete” drawing from that process. A drawing I’m usually most satisfied with.
Q: What does your process look like when you begin a new story or illustration?
A: I start my drawing process with writing poetry. The writings act as a foundation from which my drawings exist. Immersing myself with music, as well as (occasionally) smoking cannabis, I truly feel connected to the unique language and universe I created for myself conceptually. The impulsivity of it all ties everything together. How do I want this specific emotion/narrative to be portrayed at this specific point in my life?
Q: How do humor and darker themes come together in your visual language?
A: To have humor and darker themes means to have levels in your drawings. If I can make these opposing themes coexist in a way that creates not only a visually appealing drawing, but a momentous and familiar feeling to my audience, then I have done my job. My “darker themes” are nothing but pictorial interpretations of my truth, and some people may feel uncomfortable witnessing it, and that is completely valid.
Q: Many of your characters seem both familiar and a little surreal. Where do they come from?
A: Many of my subjects are close friends or mutuals of mine. In some cases I have myself depicted in the drawing if I felt that specific piece involved a concept that was extremely personal. I want my drawings to consist of a distorted reality that only exists in poetry, and executed in a manner that feels very much like a memory. Staging my figures is part of the fun of my storytelling process. As if this entire romantic life we live through is a theatrical play we are forced to act in. A relatable feeling.
Q: How do you see the role of storytelling evolving in your current work?
A: My earlier work was driven through the power of trauma, a bold “statement,” as you will. As I progressed through my artistic journey, I’ve noticed my work showcasing an alternate version of vulnerability, one that feels less invasive and more sincere. Everyone’s perspective changes over time as we grow through new experiences. My work is learning to adjust and settle into the emotion I am currently experiencing with my romantic life I currently have.
Q: What kind of stories or feelings are you most drawn to exploring next?
A: My work will forever be powered by passion and emotion, because that’s what I believe makes a “perfect” drawing. Autobiographical memory and the queer experience also will remain present; however, I’m open to what my future of storytelling holds next. It all depends on what I will go through at that specific period of my journey. Only time will tell.
